Start-up launches ‘back to work’ initiative

MANGALURU: While the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have significantly impacted the economic activities and resulted in major job cuts and layoffs,

Springworks

, a HR Tech startup has launched

SpringRecruit

‘back to work’ project. The aim is to help people who have lost jobs to get back to work, by showcasing a candidate’s profile to recruiters, hiring managers and employers who access their website. It is based on a forever-free

Applicant Tracking System

.


Abhash Kumar, marketing head, Springworks, told TOI, “We started the Springworks ‘back-to-work' initiative in January, when Oyo did a round of massive layoffs. The intent was to help the laid-off candidates get easily discovered by recruiters. At that point more than 400 Oyo employees shared their profiles and over 100 recruiters signed up to get access to these profiles.”

Once the major round of layoffs started post-Covid 19, the team reshared the project details on various social media platforms where these posts have received upwards of 5,00,000 impressions. Since then, an additional 2,000 candidates have shared their profile and the number of recruiters at this point is 750 plus, said Abhash.

The team periodically checks with the candidates and updates/refreshes the list to exclude those who are not looking for a job anymore. “We don't have quantitative data on how many candidates have been hired as a direct result of this initiative, but several candidates have written to us on LinkedIn, Twitter and email about getting interviews via the initiative and thanking us for the same," he said.

Springworks intends to do this as long as candidates and recruiters are finding value. In fact, they have recently started spending weekends to help some of the interested candidates with mock interviews.

Kartik Mandaville

, CEO and founder and Anoop,

Business Development Operations head

are conducting mock interviews that are totally pro bono.

Kartik Mandaville said, "Hiring has definitely taken a major hit, but many companies use the opportunity to bolster their business during such times. If you take our company for example, we have doubled down and in fact, accelerated our product roadmap during this period. And we are hiring for critical roles that will help us in doing that. One of the advantages that recruiters see in hiring recently laid-off employees is the fact that the notice period is essentially zero and the candidate can join the company immediately," he said.

Kartik and Abhash are alumni of

Manipal Institute of Technology

.

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